Statue of John Chilembwe in London

Irish Savant – Sept 30, 2022

Prior to its becoming the British Protectorate of Nyasaland Malawi (as it’s known today) served but one purpose: To round up slaves and sell them on the Muslim slave traders in Zanzibar. It may have kept the local warlords wealthy and happy but of course the same can’t be said for the rest of the population. Into this environment was born John Chilembwe, the fruit of unholy congress between his mother and her owner, a local slave trader. Not an auspicious entry to this world.

Historian Alexendar Chula describes the contemporary scene as follows: “British missionaries were essential to the formation of modern Malawi. Before their arrival it was the land that fed the vast Indian Ocean slave trade. For centuries the Arabs and their Islamicised indigenous accomplices had been capturing and trading slaves in incalculable numbers. David Livingstone (of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame) called it “the open sore of the world”. The issue obsessed him and in response he stirred up one of the greatest moral crusades of modern times.” In response the British Government forced the abandonment of the practice and for good measure established hospitals, “schools and colleges of towering ambition”.

All of this presented young Chilembwe with much-improved prospects and he subsequently hit what was then the equivalent of the Malawian Jackpot: After being befriended by a local White missionary, Joseph Booth, he was taken to America and enrolled in a Baptist seminary. Soon after qualifying he returned to Africa where he set up his own church and ran a few business ventures on the side. Or maybe it was the other way around. Quite a turnaround. From the likelihood of being a gelded slave in Arabia he was now a Western-educated priest and businessman.

Unfortunately John’s entrepreneurial talents were, well, African, and within a short time the ventures began to flounder. Being a man ahead of his time he attributed this to the racist behaviour of local Whites against whom he began to harbour deep resentment, to the point of inciting his followers to rise up in rebellion. What the ensuing revolt lacked in military impact was more than compensated by its barbarity.

The first victim was a local planter named Livingstone (any relation to the man who freed the country?) who was hunted down in his house and decapitated in front of his wife and children. Following this John celebrated a religious service in which (having clearly imbibed the finer points of Anglican liturgical practice) the decapitated head, dripping in blood and gore, held centre place on the altar. Spiritually fortified, the blood-crazed savages then set out to find their next victim. Unfortunately the mission post they had targeted had been abandoned with only a sick child and a priest (who had stayed to care for her) remaining. Both were beaten and stabbed mercilessly but miraculously survived.

Despite this stirring revolt against tyranny the local population dashed John’s hopes of a widespread rebellion and in fact turned against him, hunting him down and killing him not long afterwards. His body was left to rot in the jungle.

I know what you’re thinking on reading this: John has Nobel Peace Prize laureate written all over him. Unfortunately the awarding Committee doesn’t award the Prize posthumously – although they did award it prematurely, before the Hawaiian/Kenyan had even started his campaign of mass killing. So how can his place in history be honoured? Well he’s getting his own statue in the centre of the former Empire’s capital. How about that?

And it’s not just any statue. It shows John, in a magisterial pose, dwarfing the diminutive presence of his erstwhile White benefactor (pictured above). One thing you can say about the sculpture is that it’s not subtle, leaving nothing to the imagination regarding the revised status of the respective races. According to Sadiq Khan, the Pakistani Muslim now reigning over London, the design “Was chosen to shine a spotlight on important issues our [sic] society continues to face”. Like the epidemic of stabbings carried out by Africans which makes London a no-go area after dark? Maybe, but somehow I doubt that’s what he had in mind.

“Deprive a people of its history, of its traditions, of its inherited culture, and you deprive it of essential ingredients of its very existence. It becomes a mass of rootless individuals, of automatons, subject to the latest whim or the most persistent and enticing siren voice of some powerful ideology or, in modern times, of George Orwell’s Big Brother and its extensive tentacles in and incestuous partnership with the communications industry, education, and the media. Stripping people of their faith, and then denuding them of the essential characteristics which define them is and has always been the work of Revolutions, whether of the Cromwellian attempt in the 17th century, the fanaticism of a Robespierre in France in the late 18th, or the genocide of the Marxists in Russia and China in the twentieth century.” Boyd Cathay

Source https://www.irishsavant.net/?p=2551